Trend Prediction in Network Monitoring Systems[收藏]

Trend Prediction in Network Monitoring Systems

March 4th, 2009 by Tim Bass

Following up on Real-Time Predictive Analytics for Web Servers I thought we should “move up a level” and look at various open network monitoring platforms with trend prediction capabilities.

Our web server management team picked Zabbix to monitor a busy production server and then we started to look into adding predictive analytics afterwards. Alberto recommended we look into The R Project for open source predictive analytics, which was interesting because I was just about to blog on TIBCO’s integration of S-Plus with Spotfire. Then, my research led me to an interesting comparative analysis regarding S, S-Plus and R based on Aberto’s recommendation. (Thanks Alberto!)

Instead of writing on S, S-Plus and R today, I thought it might be good to take a look at potential trend prediction capabilities in network monitoring systems, especially the “open, free ones” under the GPL or similar license. Based on this Wikipedia chart, A short comparison between the most common network monitoring systems, there are 3 out of 40 listed NMS platforms with trend prediction capabilities, GroundWork Community, Osmius and Zenoss. Unfortunately for us, Zabbix does not yet have trend prediction capabilities; however, the Zabbix project leader says he plans to add this functionality “in the future,” which is not very encouraging, since we don’t know what “this future functionality” will be.

Osmius claims to be event-oriented software with a “realistic and practical platform” to apply research and investigative results including AI and event correlation processes. Osmius aims reduce the volume of “final events” to process to identify the root cause of problems, including predicting problems before they occur. Osmius boasts off-line data mining capability with a pattern language to discover event occurrence patterns. We need to look into Osmius more and see if there is any substance to the marketing claims.

Unfortunately, we could not find any concrete trend prediction capabilities in GroundWork, especially in the free and open community version of the software. This makes sense since GroundWork is based on Nagios, and Nagios does not have built-in forecasting and predictive analytics. Also, a preliminary look into Zenoss was not very encouraging, as we could not find solid evidence of predictive analytics and forecasting functionality.

As for next steps, I think we’ll look a bit deeper into a few of these software platforms and see if we can find out exactly what forecasting methods they use, if any, for outage prediction. If anyone has any knowledge or experience in these NSM event processing platforms and their capabilities regarding predictive analytics and outage forecasting, please comment. Thanks!

Also, I still have some blogging to do on TIBCO’s integration of Spotfire and Insightful’s S-Plus, both acquired by TIBCO last year, as I recall. I am interested to see when and how TIBCO integrates off-line analytics (Spotfire, Insightful, S-Plus) with real-time event processing.